


your sweet hand in mine

by vaudelin



Series: supernatural codas [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accent what accent, Angst and Feels, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Episode: s13e22 Exodus, Gen, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 00:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14659593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin/pseuds/vaudelin
Summary: Rowena does a double-take when she sees them enter, Cas handcuffed beside his darker twin. She looks between them, then looks to Cas, her expression caught in half-measures that seem appropriate when regarding a doppelganger drafted from the other side.“Bind him,” Cas tells her, pushing Castiel roughly. “Thoroughly,” he adds.Rowena, wilting but not yet drained, warily complies.





	your sweet hand in mine

**Author's Note:**

> this is what happens when you listen to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB7E1D_3Na4) on repeat and think about the origins of alt!cas for so long you dissociate please enjoy

Castiel comes quietly with the rest of the survivors, at least until the angelic handcuffs come out. After that, it is hours upon hours of Cas dragging him bodily towards the rift, to the point where even pushing him through does not bring Cas any sense of relief.

Rowena does a double-take when she sees them enter, Cas handcuffed beside his darker twin. She looks between them, then looks to Cas, her expression caught in half-measures that seem appropriate when regarding a doppelganger drafted from the other side.

“Bind him,” Cas tells her, pushing Castiel roughly. “Thoroughly,” he adds.

Rowena, wilting but not yet drained, warily complies.

* * *

They bring Castiel to an interrogation room within the bunker. They bind him to a chair, his hands cuffed with magic, forcibly stiff at his sides.

Bobby and Mary, Sam and Dean, spend collective hours questioning him. Cas hangs back from the intrigue, watching through the security feed. He knows how hopeless a ritual this is, but voicing it would only cast shadows onto himself.

This Castiel, with his twitches and scars and bad eye, tied up in the same chair where Donatello’s mind had been liquefied, would give up nothing beneath the tame form of questioning being offered.

Cas watches, but Castiel remains unaffected by the humans who know his name.

* * *

Small things change now that the survivors have moved into the bunker. With so many people living in one space schedules are spelled out for everyone, routines like laundry and showers and research parsed out in even shifts. Cas stands unchanged through it, the stream of people flowing around him as if he is mired in mud.

The survivors of that world don’t trust him, though they reluctantly embrace the benefits he brings them. Jack, they find easier to accept, but Cas to them is an ill-reputed stranger. He’ll never find their kinship while that cloud hangs around his name.

So Cas tries not to take their glares seriously, nor linger on the sting that comes whenever Charlie flinches away from his place in her line of vision. Cas tries to appreciate how Sam moves to sit beside him, between him and the others, acting as both a rock and a barricade.

Cas tries not to take it personally when all they see of him is the other him, when the salute to their new brothers name only Sam and Dean. He doesn’t blame them. This mistrust, it is the brand he deserves.

* * *

Cas drifts through the bunker in idle circles, though he strays back toward Castiel’s cell again and again. Morbid fascination lures him in as much as it repulses him. The existence of the other angel draws on him like a flame.

Cas circles the cell quarters until he closes in on the room where Castiel is kept. He rests a hand on the door, nails clutching at the iron and wood, then steadies himself. He glances at the security camera as he enters.

The room is dim. Poorly furnished. Decorated only with the chair upon which Castiel is bound. The red ribbons of Rowena’s spell flutter around his body. Though he otherwise remains still, Castiel’s face spasms with unwanted expressions, his cheek pulling his lips around on marionette lines.

Instinct rises again in Cas, that same impulse that nearly led to him stabbing Castiel with an angel blade. Just the sight of Castiel, both within and without his vessel, is enough to summon a throbbing ache in Cas’ own demolished wings.

His blade slides out again involuntarily, but the desire to end him is stifled by the same reasons as before: that Dean, for whatever reason, does not want Cas to kill him. That this other Castiel might serve a purpose for them yet.

The motion of the blade drawing into his hand, that slight sing of metal in the air, is enough to earn Castiel’s attention. He glances at Cas with one cloudy eye, the damage of which tremors through the blistered rings and feathers that comprise his true form.

“Appealing, isn’t it?” Castiel calls after him, puffing himself up, when Cas turns abruptly on his heel. The ruffle of his warped wings follows Cas out the door.

* * *

In the morning, Cas waits patiently for Sam and Dean to arise. He paces his way through their morning routine, staving off his need to speak until they’ve devoured most of their breakfast.

“I would like to take him outside,” Cas tells them, once the last of the runny eggs has been sopped up by corners of toast.

Dean frowns, pausing in his chewing. “Who?”

“Him,” Cas says. “Me. The other one.”

Dean shakes his head vigorously through his mouthful, leaving Sam the only one capable of verbalizing a reply. “Cas, I don’t think—if he gets out of the bunker, don’t you think he’ll run?”

“He can’t,” Cas says, because it is easier to explain than _He won’t_. “Where would he go? Besides, Rowena’s spell will hold him. We won’t wander very far.”

Sam and Dean exchange that look again, the one that reminds Cas of his station here. That if his actions serve their purpose, they will allow it; otherwise Cas is just another nuisance in their way.

Dean crumples a napkin against his mouth. It drops to his plate. “Sure. Who knows—might help bring him over to our side.”

Dean pats him on the shoulder, and Cas nods as if he agrees. He thinks Dean doesn’t understand yet, which is fine. Dean doesn’t have to understand; Cas doubts he ever will.

* * *

On the day Cas brings Castiel out from his cell, the skies outside are spring-warm and sunny.

The land surrounding the bunker is mostly barren prairie, fallow fields where ranchers bring their cattle to lazily graze. Strips of forest grows out between the acres, clinging like small oases of brush where the wilds yet thrive. It’s too early in the year for the full show of life from the trees here, but the branches are lit up by budding leaves, and the mottled grounds are covered by patches of unkempt green.

Cas leads them down through the ditches, through where the scrub grows long and dried bulrushes peer up from puddles buried by the detritus of last winter. He doesn’t look to see whether Castiel follows, though he does, slouching and reluctant, his true form shivering beneath the onslaught of so much green. His hands twitch within the confines of Rowena’s red magic.

“I like it here,” Cas says, barely above the thrum of the wind. He thinks Castiel likes it too, gauging by how his wings puff out, warming beneath the sun. “You can’t see it now, but there are wildflowers that grow here. So many that grow, out here—” he waves vaguely at the ditches, by the roads where Dean drives “—and here,” Cas adds, gesturing to the trees. “Bellflowers and columbines, mostly. Burdock and blue asters by the fall. Dean says the yellow primroses attract the deer, which are a nuisance to him, but I like how they—”

“Dean is your world’s righteous man, is he?” Castiel cuts in, coming to a rest among the pussywillows.

“Yes,” Cas answers carefully, though he knows—he senses—what is to come.

Castiel ruffles what is left of his feathers, the secondary flights making a poor show of compensating for the primaries he’s lost. He surveys the land, his mouth twitching, coiled around an injury Cas isn’t entirely certain he recognises.

“Your righteous man,” Castiel growls, glaring at Cas with one blue eye. “You follow him, thinking he’s worthy. But he isn’t even worth _half_ of my own righteous man.”

Castiel spits at the ground between them, and with that Cas sees red. He fires out at Castiel with a rage he hadn’t foreseen, taking two fistfuls of black overcoat in hand and forcing Castiel back, forcing him down, throwing him onto his back on the dirt.

“And what of you, _Castiel_ ,” Cas snarls over him. “What did you do for your righteous man? Did you fight for him? Did you bleed? Did you save him in the end? Or did you leaving him to die with the rest of the humans—”

“You know nothing—” Castiel spits, but Cas isn’t ready for him to talk just yet.

“I know,” Cas says. “I know what they did to you. Your Naomi wouldn’t be so different from mine. I know the tools she has in her arsenal, the tricks she has to getting her way. I know how hard she tries to reprogram us. What I don’t know is how you allowed it to _stick_.”

Castiel rears his head back with an animalistic rage, catching Cas by surprise when he cracks their skulls together. Cas flinches back and fires out with a fist on instinct, connecting with a spasming cheek, a second fist slamming into Castiel full on his chin.

Castiel spits blood at his back, as Cas drags him back toward the bunker. “Your humans aren’t worthy of the faith you have in them,” Castiel tells him, but Cas, moving one foot in front of the other, cares little for offering a reply.

Back inside the cell, Cas does not ask to bring Castiel outside again.

* * *

Midnight leaves the bunker silent. Cas wanders the halls, restless, while his people sleep. Castiel’s words haunt him even now, hours later, the emotion in his voice echoing as Cas’ own voice inside his head.

Cas finds himself drawn to Castiel, as ever, though this time he is surprised to find he isn’t alone inside his cell.

Cas draws the door open silently, lured in by the low voice speaking. He spies Dean sitting across from Castiel, arms crossed over the back of his chair, murmuring promises of deals that might make if only Castiel agrees to switch sides.

“There’s good in you,” Dean tells Cas’ darker self, sitting unresponsive across from him. “Our Cas, he had rough patches too. But we brought him through it, so don’t think that we’ll give up on you.”

Cas listens, still as a stone in the shadows, listening while Dean talks. Closing his eyes against the ache it brings him.

Dean shuffles in his seat, awaiting a response. Castiel stares at Dean the same way he stares at nothing. Like he is meaningless. His mouth pulls at itself as he formulates a reply.

“I see now,” Castiel says finally. “What he sees in you.”

“So is that a yes?” Dean asks, but Castiel has no further answers for him.

Cas slips out from the room before Dean sees him, before Dean realises that Castiel’s words were not directed at him.

* * *

The evening’s council meeting revolves around the problem of Castiel. Everything is ready for the assault against Michael, the only piece left unmatched being the reluctant angel in their midst.

Cas stands offside, listening while Bobby and Sam, Mary and Dean, all argue about what should be done with him. Denial and bargaining battle it out against anger, and some sort of rehabilitation scheme is tossed out across the war table into the open air.

“Well?” Dean asks, rounding on Cas, expecting backup.

Cas offers a careful shrug. He answers only once it becomes clear that Dean won’t allow anyone else to speak until Cas has his say.

Cas draws in a breath, knowing it for the final calm before Dean storms down on him for good. “I think he should be killed.”

And that—that goes over precisely as well as Cas expected. Perhaps even better, since it is only Dean yelling at him now, only Dean drowning out the voices of the others, only Dean clearly incredulous of Cas as he says, “Really? You? Of all the people here—you really want to put him down?”

Cas bites his cheeks. He forces all emotion out from his voice, hiding his self-loathing from himself and from Dean, for the moment. He says what he’s known since he first laid eyes on his apocalyptic half, what he’s known must happen since before Dean stayed the blade in his hand.

Cas won’t explain how this Castiel is but a bundle of guilt and faulty programming fighting for control. He keeps it simple as he says, “Dean, he’s suffering. He wants to be let go.”

Dean shakes his head, disbelieving. He takes a step back. Takes a long while to settle.

“He’ll come around,” Dean says finally, staring straight through Cas. “You did. He’ll come around too.”

Dean nods to himself, making it final.

Cas stands in the wake of Dean’s storm, caught in the musty grey misery of his own foul mood. He watches Dean leave knowing that his disappointment matches the faces all around him, that in spite of his intentions Cas has only managed to hurt Dean once again.

* * *

Even later, when he is alone and all his second-guessing has been done, Cas knows he is right, although there is no way for him to explain it all to Dean. He suspects Dean would have had to have been there, that afternoon when Cas dragged the other one back to the bunker, Castiel’s mouth bloody from the knuckles that split his bottom lip.

That after their fight, the other Castiel admitted that he was never as close to Michael’s vessel as Cas was to Dean, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t tried. That he hadn’t admired the vessel’s family, or that he hadn’t tried to sway the man from saying yes. And Castiel, after the final showdown came and passed, he fled. He helped the humans he could. At least until they found him again. Until they forced Castiel to hone his skills on the humans he once loved, and how the way in which those humans broke by his hands haunts him still.

That day, as Cas dragged his counterpart back through fallow fields, Castiel had sobbed, caught between hysteria and grief, that _Your humans, you are not worthy of the faith they have in you_.

Cas knows this. He agrees. Only he has no way of telling all these things to Dean, of revealing the depths to which that Castiel has been destroyed, not without telling Dean the depths to which Cas loves him too.

* * *

After.

After further arguments, after Dean and Sam rallied and railed against what they learned were Castiel’s wishes, and after they eventually succumbed; after they had dug the hole and laid his vessel’s body to rest—

Cas stares out at the fallow field around them. He listens to the whisper of birds and bugs and wind. He almost hears the flutter of wings not his own behind him. He shakes in some fundamental way he doesn’t yet comprehend.

Dean breathes out deeply beside him, leaning heavily on a spade beside the freshly filled grave. He wipes sweat from his brow, then frowns down at the dirt on his hand.

Cas reaches for him. He takes Dean’s wrist carefully in hand. “Thank you,” Cas says. “For changing me.”

Dean watches him closely, unknowing and somehow not needing to know. He turns his hand around, palm upward, his fingers unfurling as Cas slides to fit Dean’s hand.

Castiel thinks he will like it here, buried beneath the yellow primroses. He would, if it were him.

**Author's Note:**

> also on [tumblr](https://vaudelin.tumblr.com/post/173899226123/your-sweet-hand-in-mine).


End file.
